Educational Science

Video captures unusual death of baby bird drowned by a fish

When a sparrow's nest flooded during high tide in coastal Georgia, a fish jumped at the chance to make a meal of a newly hatched chick, and a scientist's video camera caught a first-ever view of the entire deadly encounter. Footage showed a small fish called a mummichog (Fundulus heteroclitus)...

'You can see its guts and things': Weird see-through crustacean with giant eyes discovered off the Bahamas

Using LED lights and glow sticks, scientists in the Bahamas have discovered an ancient deep-sea crustacean with giant eyes and a see-through body. Although the species, which they named Booralana nickorum, is newly identified, it has been on the planet for 300 million years and may play a crucial role...

Australia's avian celebrity Joe the Pigeon is getting a new lease on life after authorities determined he is not a biosecurity threat. Joe's story started last month when a man in Melbourne found the seemingly emaciated pigeon wearing a leg band in his backyard. According to Australia's 9News, the man,...

Half-male, half-female songbird discovered in Pennsylvania

Biologists recently made a once-in-a-lifetime discovery of a bird that's male on the right side and female on the left. Researchers captured the bird, a rose-breasted grosbeak (Pheucticus ludovicianus), at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History's Powdermill Nature Reserve, an environmental research center in Rector, Pennsylvania. Plumage colors usually signal...

Pelican rescued from Deepwater Horizon disaster flies hundreds of miles home

A brown pelican rescued from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill 11 years ago has finally returned home. After being found completely covered in oil on June 14, 2010, the bird was taken from Louisiana to Georgia to avoid the ongoing spill, where it was later rehabilitated and released. Now, over...

Cause of mysterious bald eagle deaths found after 25 years

A mysterious neurodegenerative disease has been killing bald eagles and other animals at lakes across the United States. And after 25 years of sleuthing, researchers have finally figured out its cause. The disease, known as vacuolar myelinopathy (VM), was first discovered in 1994 when a large number of bald eagle...

Condors won't stop visiting (and trashing) this California woman's house. Here's why.

Over the weekend ~15 California condors descended on my moms house and absolutely trashed her deck. They still haven’t left. It sucks but also this is unheard of, there’s only 160 of these birds flying free in the state and a flock of them decided to start a war with...

Raven 'queen' missing from Tower of London, feared dead

One of the iconic ravens that resides in the Tower of London is missing, and officials fear the worst. Will the tower fall, as legend warns? (Probably not.) Merlina, a female raven (Corvus corax), joined the corvid community at the tower in 2007, and has reigned since then as the...

This Muppet-faced frogmouth is the 'most Instagrammable bird' on Earth

The sky is full of exceptional birds. Cardinals bedecked with half-male, half-female plumage; godwits that can soar 7,500 miles (12,000 kilometers) across oceans nonstop; parrots that can best Harvard undergrads in a classic con game (no student loans required). Then, there are birds whose only claim to fame is their...